Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  When he found out, the Catchkeep-priest had whipped her to within an inch of her life, and it was a long time before she tried again to help anyone but the dead. She never saw that couple and their staring skull-baby again, except in dreams. She had not come upon their ghosts yet, either, but she figured it was only a matter of time. She wondered whether they would come to her starved or stabbed.

  The black peak’s name—Execution Hill—was an old one. The name was in the field notes, and the field notes did not lie.

  On a good day, it was two hours’ walk down from her house and across the orchard to the foot of the Hill. This was not a good day. She picked her way down the path, her legs slogging, her feet slipping on the scree. She wasn’t letting herself think about her ankle.

  Still, the day was clear, and she’d missed the sharp sweet smell of the warn-fires. It was getting cold. Soon she’d be cracking cat-ice on the puddles when the catchment bins went dry. And soon a brush fire in a smoky hearth and the terrified charity of the people would be all that stood between her and the winter. She could starve to rattling bones and the people still wouldn’t take her in any sooner than they would a rabid dog.

  With the hills now behind her, and the Catchkeep-priest somewhere among them, presumably wending his way back to town, she allowed herself to slow. Still keeping her breath measured. Still not letting herself limp. Still not betraying that the muscles of her calves were already quivering with the effort. That she’d eaten the flatbread and raisins and her head still swam with hunger. That she’d like to sit and breathe that clear cold air awhile and hoard it in her until it began, from inside out, to scrub her clean.

  The orchard opened out before her and she headed in. At the first row of trees she stopped to fill what space was left in the backpack with apples. She kept one back to eat, spitting maggots as she walked.

  She would have liked to sit beneath the trees a while instead. It might have been her last chance to do so before the snows came. But she knew the Catchkeep-priest was right. No ghost liked to be kept waiting.

  Chapter Two

  Wasp was never sure whether it was because the Archivists’ presence drew them, or because their presence drew the Archivists, but the ghosts always came up thick as suns-and-moons on Execution Hill. The field notes theorized that since deaths had happened there, there ghosts remained, each pacing out its circuit like a dog on a chain too short for comfort. Each with its dream (some previous Archivist had written) of a long drop on a short rope, or an axe to the neck, or a half-dozen bullets sinking themselves, warm as kisses, in its flesh. However it was they’d killed people here, back in the world Before.

  But then there were the ghosts that didn’t fit in to that theory. Infant ghosts, blue-faced with crib-death. Ghosts that had visibly died from illness or old age. Ghosts traveling with the company they’d died in: singly, or in pairs, or whole bouquets. Gangs of starving children. Families. Traveling like any wanderers on any road, linking hands and lighting fires against the eyes out in the dark. And nobody knew why.

  Various Archivists had added their guesses to the field notes, but until somebody captured a ghost that could talk, guesses were what they’d remain. There was even a list, worn and soiled from the hands of countless Archivists, of questions one was supposed to ask a ghost, if a ghost was ever found who could reply. Name of specimen. Age of specimen. Description of surrounding environment during specimen’s lifetime. Description of specimen’s life, work, family, friends, enemies. Does the specimen recognize other ghosts? How does the specimen decide where to appear in the living world? Where does it come from when it appears? Where does it go? How many found objects in the Waste can the specimen identify? Did the world die during the specimen’s lifetime? Place and manner of specimen’s death. Manner of the world’s death, if known, in as much detail as possible.

  Wasp was no nearer than her predecessors to filling any of those answers in. As far as she could tell, the dead conversing with the living was a thing that happened in stories. Carrion Boy slinking down out of the stars to scare dreamers into a year of wakefulness, or the Chooser giving people advice that was like as not to get them killed.

  But she was the Archivist, and it was her job to get those answers or die trying.

  You uselessness, the Catchkeep-priest would say. You misery. Why do we keep you? You’re no solace to anyone. You couldn’t unpuzzle a snarl in your hair.

  “You keep me,” Wasp muttered to herself, kicking windfalls, “because none of you can kill me.”

  Long years had passed since Execution Hill had frightened her, though today, the prospect of the climb was almost enough to turn her on her heel and send her home. She could still see the remains of the narrow old road that spiraled up, or did once, to a high broad stage-like ledge seventy-or eighty-odd yards from the ground where she stood. The road was mostly crumbled now, a path at best, punched into powder by some storm, or the weight of years, or maybe the same blast of lightning that had clawed the scar into the face of the Hill.

  She was not frightened anymore. Now she only felt affinity. “That’s right, you bitch,” she told it, unconsciously setting one hand to her own matching scar, Catchkeep’s mark. “I’m still here.”

  Wasp tore a strip from her sleeve and bound the lid to the jar, then the jar to the pack, and climbed.

  She did not come here often. At first the Catchkeep-priest didn’t even know she could climb to the ledge, thought she’d be daunted by the crumbled path like so many other Archivists before her and choose to catch her ghosts elsewhere. That information had proven useful to her, her first year: this was where she’d hidden from Catchkeep’s shrine-dogs, the first time she’d attempted escape—it was here or else the lake, rocks in her pockets, and the lake had almost won.

  And then the dogs had treed her on the ledge, hunger had forced her down eventually, and all she had to show for it anymore was a pain in her heels when it rained, from when the Catchkeep-priest had dragged her back in triumph through the town, spitting, slashing, half-starved, and smashed her feet between two stones.

  Sheer dumb luck, or stubbornness, she’d healed. But the place tended to leave a bad taste in her mouth after that. Still, she was the only one she knew of who could climb the thing, and so it remained her location of choice for disobeying direct orders.

  Today, though, as much as she’d like to, she wasn’t planning on disobeying anything. After what she’d done on the Archivist-choosing day, Wasp’s educated guess was that pushing the Catchkeep-priest any further right now wasn’t exactly going to end in her favor. But she’d already had enough of people today, and the ledge was still one place where she could go where she was guaranteed to be left alone.

  In the end, she made it up there gracelessly. She almost broke the jar several times and almost fell to her probable death at least twice. But it was worth it when she hauled her screaming muscles up onto that high black ledge, her hands leaving sweaty palmprints on the rock, and she looked down knowing that the Catchkeep-priest, if he were standing at the foot of the Hill, would be the size of a beetle to her eyes, and that a lucky dropped rock would end him.

  She set the backpack down. Against it, the jar tried to wiggle from its bonds. The lid heaved and clacked a little but stayed shut.

  “Easy, easy,” she told it. “Not much longer now.”

  As she spoke, she was untying the knots holding the jar against the pack. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a low pale huddle, keeping as far away from her as the ledge allowed. She would not look at it. She did not look at it. Not yet.

  Instead she kept talking, low and sweet as she was able, knowing that the ghost in the jar couldn’t understand her words, unsure whether the soft steady noise of them might calm it anyway. Working the rust of two weeks’ disuse from her voice. “Sorry about the wait. Locked in there for so long, nothing to look forward to except me destroying you when I finally let you out.” The knot came loose and she sat on her heels a minute, imagining those smo
oth clay walls all around her, too narrow to stretch her arms or comfortably sit. “Well, if it helps, we’re not so different, you know. I just live in a bigger jar, and they give me a fighting chance when they let me out of it. But if I win, I go back in. You’re better off. You get cut loose. One way or another.” She lifted the lid off the jar. “Anyway, come on out. I promise I’ll make it quick.”

  She gave it a moment. Nothing happened. She peered into the jar. Just a silvery blur, sunk to the bottom like fog.

  She’d never seen a ghost so weakened. For all she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get it out of the jar. Could she still send it on to Catchkeep if it was stuck in there? It had never been covered in her predecessors’ field notes, and today was not the day to be screwing things up. She took the notebook from the backpack and settled in to wait, thumbing back through the few field notes she’d taken on this ghost the day she’d caught it.

  found at the baker’s house.

  There’d been salt at the baker’s house, she remembered. Salt despite the ban. Idiot. She was tired of cleaning up after stupid people.

  throwing-things-ghost. nasty. annoying. looked like it died violently. attacked the baker’s wife. howling so loud the baker’s ears bled.

  It had been dripping silver, slinging gouts of silver as it smashed facefirst into walls. The baker’s sleeping-room would never be the same.

  tried to attack me, got put down.

  Her eyes strayed from the page to the jar, her brain unwilling to match the ghost that had crushed the baker’s wife’s face like an eggshell with the washed-out used-up squashed bug of a ghost she had here.

  useless for study. going to give it a day to calm down, then see if i can get anything out of it.

  It’d had no discernible gender. No clothing. It had barely been person-shaped. Many decent specimens tended to mime the moment of their deaths, over and over, allowing Archivists to guess at least at what had killed them. Not this one. Beyond a mouth, it hadn’t even had features to its face. Just a blur of light and rage.

  Wasp had found it tearing up the baker’s house two days before the Archivist-choosing fight. Being forgotten in its jar on her shelf for two weeks while she’d healed had calmed it down, all right, but it looked much the same. Only smaller. Less angry. Like a fire that had nearly gone out.

  She stuck a finger in the jar. Poked the ghost, and her finger sank in to the first knuckle. No response.

  There was still a little space left on the page. She wiped her finger off on her leg and took out a charcoal.

  too weak now to even take shape. left in the jar too long? no fight left in it. almost dead. if that even happens.

  conclusion: ghosts wither in captivity.

  She read it over. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was an observation she’d never seen written up before, and that had to count for something. At least it might save her a beating when she reported her day’s work to the Catchkeep-priest. Maybe.

  Weak and insubstantial as the ghost had become, being here, in a ghost-place, seemed to be lending it a bit of strength. As it stirred and stretched at the bottom of the jar, sending out stubby appendages from its mass, Wasp put the notebook down and began readying the items for the ritual that would destroy a ghost that had given its Archivist as much information as she was likely to get out of it. In this case, almost none. Waste of time, really.

  She was moving quicker now. No point in being cruel, letting the ghost come into its strength only to annihilate it. Not when all it had to do was get out of the jar.

  She took the firestarter out of the backpack, and a handful of dried leaves. A tiny plastic vial of water and another of milk followed those. The milk was long since soured, but that didn’t matter. She set these down on the ledge in a rough circle in front of her, then put the jar, ghost and all, in the center.

  All she needed now was blood.

  She eased into a crouch as smoothly as her shaky muscles allowed. Something hissed a white streak up her leg, ankle to thigh, but she set her face and waited it out. The harvesting-knife was at her belt, and an eroded crater of black rock was by her feet, stained with rusty brown.

  A flick of the blade against her thumbtip and the blood ran down. She held it out over the crater and waited as it dripped a tiny pool, hardly big enough to drown a bug.

  The line she’d cut into her thumb had crosscut old scars from days and months and years of bloodlettings. She’d long since run out of empty spaces to slice into. A map, thought Wasp, who had seen one once. A map to nowhere.

  The ghost in the jar roused a little, scenting. Farther back, other ghosts rose and settled in a mass. Out of the corner of her eye she watched them watch the blood run, watched them watch her raise her bloodied hand and lick it clean.

  The silence curdled now. Clung to her crawling skin like the tarry rains of spring and did not lift. She didn’t need to look to know the ghosts were straining toward the pool and toward her backpack as far as their roots allowed, as if she were Execution Hill itself and they the orchard curled around its heels.

  She looked away from the jar for a second, just long enough to replace the notebook and charcoal in her backpack—and when she looked back at it the ghost was, impossibly, climbing out.

  It was the size of Wasp’s hand, and glowed dully silver. It was shaped like a person, or like a person as drawn by a small child. A cutout-shape person reduced to vague particulars—body, arms, legs, head. It was faceless, hairless, genderless. It gained its stubby feet and stood tilting its oversized skull at her. Wasp knew that stance. When it strengthened enough to bring its eyes in clear, they would be looking at her with the bland inquiry of an infant. If they could even see her at all.

  What baffled her was that it was out of the jar in the first place. The saltlick was still in its box in her backpack, and the blood was two feet away. Where was it getting that much strength from?

  She had two options. Hurry up and destroy the ghost before things got complicated. Or wait to see what it would do.

  Her job was to destroy it. Send it on to Catchkeep, Who would carry it to that far green shore. She’d seen enough of this ghost to know she wasn’t going to learn anything from it. She was just drawing out the inevitable, not to mention putting herself at risk. She’d had to fight this specimen once before, and she wasn’t up for a second round today.

  There had been Archivists before her who enjoyed destroying ghosts. There might well be another when she was dead. Wasp wasn’t one of them. Something about how most ghosts never seemed to want to stay still for the ritual, kept trying to drag themselves out of the circle and back toward where they’d popped out of nothing into the living world, flopping against their salt tethers like fish out of water. In the stories they all went on to Catchkeep joyfully, but whatever Wasp saw in them, she didn’t reckon it was joy.

  Not that it mattered. That was the work, and she had to do it. The least she could do, here, now, with this ghost at her mercy, was to show it some and get this over with fast.

  She drew the harvesting-knife.

  Oblivious to Wasp’s approach, the ghost took a step back, staggered a little, windmilling the paddles of its arms, then proceeded to toddle in a slow circle and fall over.

  As it lay there, its mouth came in.

  It was saying something.

  Wasp sheathed the knife so fast she almost took off a finger.

  She dropped to her knees and snatched up the little ghost. It weighed literally nothing. She’d long since gotten used to the instantaneous visceral shock of touching one, halfway between frostbite and vertigo. The ghost smushed its face against the clotting at her thumb, then took a tentative little lick. Then another. And another. At first the ghost’s tongue felt like nothing, absolutely nothing, but as the ghost battened on her, strengthening, she became aware of a scraping sensation, as though she were a hide the ghost was tanning. Tomorrow it would be a nasty bruise, her thumb would be green-purple to the webbing, and she’d have to think fa
st to keep it hidden from the Catchkeep-priest.

  She didn’t mind the pain. Whatever ghosts might do to her, she at least knew where they stood. They didn’t hurt her to benefit themselves, like the upstarts, or because they wanted her to suffer, like the Catchkeep-priest, whose hate she never fully understood. Ghosts were just hungry, lonely, lost. Desperate and confused. These were all things she could relate to. And out here, among them, was the only place she felt safe—not because none of them ever harmed her, but because they never wished her harm. They barely even knew she was there.

  As it drank, the ghost began to grow. By the time she set it down and it inched on its belly to the pool and started lapping, it was the size of a weanling pup. It drank and drank, pausing only to . . . glance? . . . over its shoulder at her with a blank silver face in which the only feature was a wide red mouth. When the pool was emptied the ghost stood the size of a two-year-old child, and its eyes had come in.

  It blinked at her, not inquisitively, not anything. She had no idea what it was seeing, but whatever it was, it wasn’t her. It stood there, its mouth releasing unformed mewing sounds in no language Wasp knew.

  Wasp held her breath, listening.

  And the hazy outline of the ghost sharpened off a little, and the sounds clarified with it. The same few syllables, looping over and over. It sounded like a name. It could have been anyone’s. A lover’s, a child’s, a friend’s. Wasp’s mouth twisted, scorn or envy.

  Then she realized what she was witnessing, and scrambled for her notebook.

  two-weeks-caught ghost